June 09, 2015

My eyes feel swollen and my insides have felt shaken for several days, the shaking doesn't seem to end only lessen from time to time. My body is weary and drained of all energy. While doing things that must be done the tears come from seemingly no where, I had forgotten I had so many tears.

These days should be marking the final countdown for Katy's wedding. Instead, we are marking days of grief and sadness as an unwanted chapter continues to unfold.

The decision to call off the engagement and cancel the wedding came late Thursday evening.

There aren't any real answers to the questions that swirl about...

"Did you see this coming?"

"Why?"

"Is it really over?"

We've sustained a trauma as a family.

Late Thursday evening we gathered on the same couch in our living room. At one point my arms held all of "the original three". My adult children all being held and holding one another as they cried together over what was happening to Katy.

We have circled the wagons pretty tight, and really haven't been separated from one another for the past few days. We are close and for all the distance that has marked the spaces of growing up and leaving home for the big kids we still remember how to come together tightly.

This is a death and it comes on top of a year that quite frankly feels unbelievable for me. I've danced around writing all the words about it, trying to name it in ways without just putting it all out there.

And now, there's no space in me to keep it sealed or masked or contained.

January brought Mark's questions about his role at Open Hearts Ministry, his questioning of whether to continue as the Executive Director.

February brought a leave of absence for him. And, my 50th Birthday.

March he resigned, and I was asked to step in as the Interim Executive Director.

Mark isn't working, isn't sure of what might be next, he needs more time to recover from the toll it has taken on him to lead OHM for the past several years

...and we moved ahead with wedding planning, hoping and anticipating.

May brought a deep betrayal in friendship that left us shaken and disrupted.

And now this.

There's no instagram photo or Facebook post for this stuff. Its the reality of life, messy and unkempt.

It feels unreal.

Saturday night we packed Katy's things, so many things, from the home she had been readying for her and Aaron. As the boxes came into the kitchen and I began the familiar task of wrapping dishes in packing paper I was faced with my own writing, from 5 years ago as we packed our home in San Antonio. This plaque was laying on the counter in her kitchen, waiting to be hung on the wall...

I haven't cried this much in years...probably not since the day we loaded the truck in Texas.

Cried and Cried.

While I am certainly so tearful, grieved and disappointed about Katy and Aaron I realize that the tears and the depth of the the ache is about more. There has been a dismantling of foundational things, things I had come to count on and in the wake of it I am again in a place surrendering to the truth of my own brokeness and the brokeness around me.

Packing and moving are such a theme in my story, the boxes and tape and packing paper are symbols for me. They mark the deconstruction of security and rest and what has been known.

They reveal the depth of the ache for Jesus to be real and present. They reveal the ache for comfort, that can come from friends and family but ultimately must come from Him.

Music played in the background as we packed, a playlist on spotify of Nichole Nordeman songs. (It seems Nichole's music marks all the heavy places in my life and she has done so again.)